Apple Watch Is A Steve Jobs Product In Its DNA

“We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter. It’s, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what’s inside it anymore?” (emphasis mine)

That’s exactly what the Apple Watch is. A computer. A very interesting computer. A product announced in 2007 but shipping in early 2015.

Gruber mentions that Apple called the chip inside the Apple Watch, the S1, a “computer on a chip”. Not a SoC (System on a Chip).

It makes sense. The Apple Watch has everything in a chip. An Apple chip. No separate radio or modems from a third party company. Apple Watch might be Apple’s best computer ever made. The purest one too.

Because Apple already announced it. During the iPhone 6 announcement. The new Apple A8 SoC comes with 2 billion transistors. Made in 20nm.

Apple Watch Is Apple’s First New Generation Computer

Think of the Apple Watch. Small screen compared to the iPhone. Not so many pixels to move around. GPU shrinks. Buffers and cache too. There is no 3G / LTE radios. More space for WiFi and Bluetooth but those work together already. CPU needs to be less powerful as well.

Put everything together in a 20nm manufacturing process and you have Apple’s first computer on a chip. On your wrist. For now.

The technology is there. Minus a few hundreds of millions of transistors. Apple Watch is just the first of the next generation of Apple computers. Not computer. That’s why Tim Cook bets the company on it.